Kirti Kamboj was born in Mumbai, and while growing up also lived in New Orleans, Atlanta, and Chicago. She worked as a researcher and a futures trader, before deciding to see what life would be like without staring at computer screens most of the day. That's also why she started blogging.
How Orientalism and ethnocentric prejudice hijacked a "scientific quest for the truth" behind yellow rain, with unsettling consequences.
My visit to the World Book Fair in Delhi, which had a bewildering number and variety of vendors.
Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino talks about the Japan nuclear disaster, her benefit album We Are The Works In Progress, spooky Tokyo, making music, and being a work in progress herself.
The debate around the New York Times magazine article "How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body," and the life-changing revelations it prompted.
The National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for unlawfully detaining individuals when there's no evidence of illegal activities under its Secure Communities Program.
The US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee approves The See Something, Say Something Act of 2011, which could encourage further racial profiling.
Hyphen examines the limitations of Mother Jones' recent article "My Summer at an Indian Call Center," which offers a simplified and at times contradictory critique of the current system of globalization.
The film Sri Lanka's Killing Fields premiered at the United Nations Human Rights Council on June 3, documenting the end of a quarter century of civil war in 2009 between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil separatist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Everything you need to know about desis in America (according to Bollywood and Hollywood films)...
On 9/11, within minutes of the attacks, four men chased after a Sikh man who had escaped from the towers and now had to escape once more for his life...[;] in Los Angeles, on September 13, 2001, an Iranian woman was punched in the eye by another woman who wanted to register her displeasure at those who look like terrorists; on September 15, 2001, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when Kimberly Lowe, a Creek Native American, stopped her car to confront a group of white males who had yelled, ‘‘Go back to your own country,’’ they pinned her down and drove over her till she died.
-Vijay Prashad, How Hindus Became Jews: American Racism after 9/11
This was the environment in which Mohsin Hamid's novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was released. The narrator, Changez, is a New York investment banker who, post-9/11, becomes disillusioned with his life and returns to Pakistan. Yet strangely enough, his leaving has little to do with the aftermath described above.
On March 10, the House Committee on Homeland Security, chaired by Rep. Peter King (R-NY), held the first in a series of hearings on “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response.” Its purpose was to investigate whether American Muslims, including around one million Asian Americans, were at fault for not doing enough to foil domestic terrorist attacks.
No matter how much I stick my head in the sand, these days there are some things that I just can't remain oblivious to.
The Social Network is the latest such tragic occurrence.